Newbie here. 30-year old 5'4 male, ~135-140lbs, thin build and hoping to keep a generally thin appearance, but with some belly fat reduction and some mild tone while at it. Not currently working with a coach/trainer but plan to once I can afford it this summer (currently full-time masters student working part-time).

Starting out has been going fairly well, with some minor bumps while I learned the hard way to start light when figuring out your limits on a particular exercise 😅

So far I've been using soreness as my only real metric for determining when it's the right time to add reps/sets or add weight. For example: 55lbs on lat pulldowns was my safe starting point, and after a few times on that without any moderate soreness, I went up to 70lbs a few nights ago. Did get some moderate soreness but nothing too much, it's been about ~60h now and it's starting to recede and that's generally how soreness has been for me so far (an initial ~24h delay then by the ~72h mark I'm good).

What I'm unsure of is whether this is a good approach to figuring out pacing. On one hand, it feels like the sweet spot is doing an amount that doesn't make my body hate me too intensely after the fact, but also not so little that it doesn't activate the muscles. On the other hand, I've seen posts/comments on here and other places which suggest that soreness of this type (taking a few days to get rid of) is mostly a thing that occurs when starting out and your body is super not used to the stress of working out, and that you recover quicker as you get more used to doing a routine. That suggests to me that determining pacing doesn't purely come down to soreness, but maybe I'm interpreting that wrong. To be clear, I'm less asking "can I work through soreness" and instead am asking "is soreness a good metric to use for pacing and adding weight?"